Counseling for academics and researchers in virginia

You’ve Worked Your Whole Life to Get Here.

so why does “here” feel so empty?

You did everything right. The degrees, the publications, the postdocs. You landed a position at an institution you're proud of: somewhere with a reputation, with resources, with colleagues whose work you genuinely admire.

And now you're sitting in your office in Charlottesville or Blacksburg or Richmond, wondering why success feels so much like survival.

The bar is high here. You knew that coming in. What you didn't anticipate was how the bar would keep rising: how every accomplishment would immediately reveal the next thing you haven't done yet. The grant you landed becomes the grant you need to renew. The paper you published becomes the paper that wasn't in a good enough journal. The course evaluations that were strong become the ones that could have been stronger.

You're surrounded by people who seem to handle this effortlessly. They publish more, present more, get invited to more things. You know, intellectually, that you're only seeing their highlight reel. But knowing that doesn't stop the comparison. It doesn't quiet the voice that says you don't quite belong here.

the daily reality for overworked academics

You arrive on campus already thinking about the twelve things you won't get to today. Your inbox is a graveyard of emails you meant to answer last week. Your calendar is a solid wall of obligations with no white space in sight.

The pressure to be visible is relentless. You need to publish, not just anywhere, but in the right places. You need to present at conferences, serve on the right committees, maintain relationships with people who matter for your career. The work itself, the thinking, the writing, the teaching, keeps getting squeezed into smaller and smaller margins.

You've started dreading things you used to enjoy. The conference that used to energize you now feels like a performance you're too tired to give. The seminar where you once loved exchanging ideas now feels like another place where you might be exposed as less brilliant than everyone assumes.

Students look at you like you have answers. Colleagues treat you like a peer. Externally, you've made it. Internally, you're waiting to be found out.

Your personal life has become an afterthought. You're physically present at home but mentally still at work. Your partner has stopped asking when things will slow down because they've heard the answer too many times. You tell yourself you'll take a real vacation soon, but "soon" keeps getting pushed back.

At night, you can't turn off. Your brain rehearses tomorrow's obligations, replays today's interactions, generates new anxieties you hadn't thought to worry about yet. Sleep, when it comes, doesn't restore you.

what productivity advice misses about academic stress

You've tried to solve this. You're at a competitive institution; excellence is what you do.

You've read about academic productivity, experimented with different workflows, attended workshops on work-life balance that felt almost satirical given your actual schedule. You've told yourself you just need to be more efficient, more strategic, more focused.

But efficiency isn't the problem. You're already efficient. You're already strategic. You've optimized everything that can be optimized, and you're still exhausted.

Here's what the advice misses: the issue isn't your time management. It's the relentless internal pressure to prove you deserve to be here. The fear that slowing down means falling behind. The belief absorbed somewhere along the way that your worth is measured by your productivity.

Those beliefs don't respond to better systems. They live in your nervous system, keeping you in a constant state of low-grade threat. Until you address them directly, no amount of optimization will help.

a therapist who knows academia from the inside

I'm Dr. Emily Fornwalt, and I work with academics and researchers across Virginia who are exhausted by the pressure to perform excellence.

I have a PhD. I've navigated the tenure track. I understand the particular strain of working in environments where "good" is never quite good enough, where the culture of achievement can become a culture of relentless self-criticism. You won't need to explain imposter syndrome, or the politics of your department, or why you can't just "take it easy."

I'm not going to give you strategies for being more productive. What I offer is the chance to understand what's driving the pressure from the inside—the perfectionism, the fear of being exposed, the patterns that were probably set long before you entered academia.

I use approaches called AEDP and interpersonal neurobiology, which means we work with your nervous system directly – the part of you that can't stop performing, can't stop comparing, can't feel safe even when you're succeeding – not just your thoughts about work.

I practice exclusively via telehealth, so whether you're in Northern Virginia, Hampton Roads, the Shenandoah Valley, or a small college town, we can work together without adding another item to your impossible schedule.

what recovery from academic burnout looks like

The imposter feeling fades. You stop waiting to be found out. When you walk into a room of accomplished colleagues, you feel like you belong there; not because you've finally achieved enough, but because your sense of worth is no longer dependent on external validation.

You work hard without being driven. There's a difference between choosing to invest in your career and being compelled by anxiety to never stop. You start operating from the first place instead of the second. The work gets done. It might even get better.

You tolerate imperfection. The paper goes out before it's perfect. The lecture is prepared, not polished to exhaustion. You discover that "good enough" is often genuinely good—and that the extra hours of perfectionism weren't adding as much as you thought.

Comparison loses its power. A colleague's success doesn't trigger a comparison spiral. You can admire someone else's work without it meaning anything about your own. You're clearer about what you're building and why.

You recover outside of work. Evenings and weekends feel like real rest, not just time you're failing to use productively. You take vacation without bringing your laptop. You remember what it's like to be a person, not just an academic.

You make decisions about your future. From clarity, not desperation. Whether you stay in this role, seek something different, or eventually leave academia, the choice belongs to you, not to your anxiety.